Wet Signatures and the Wonderful World of Schnorr …

Signatures are at the core of our world of trust. For centuries we have used them as a legal way of proving our identity and in confirming our approval of something:

But, in this modern world, our usage of wet signatures is flawed, and have very little credibility. Few of us have to sign for things these days, and thus our signature is often difficult to properly verify. Along with this we often just sign the last page of a document, and where a malicious entity could replace all the other pages. Wet signatures, too, are often scanned and added to documents as GIF files, and then converted into PDF format. All these methods have virtually zero credibility.

In a digital age, we thus need to move to methods which are almost 100% certain, and where we create signatures which cannot be forged, and which validate that the contents of a message/document have not been changed. For this we need digital signatures, and one of the most widely used methods is based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC): ECDSA.

With ECDSA we create a public and a private key, and then sign a message with the private key, and where the public key is then used to check…